Back in college in the early
eighties, I came up with the plot/question of what it would be like – as
written from the inside – to have one's memories thoroughly scrambled. Picture
your life as a large binder full of many, many pages of photos, letters,
stories, recollections, and so on. Whoops; binder snaps open under a strong
wind, and the pages go flying downfield.
You hurriedly gather the sheets…
but there's no longer any continuity between them, no progression from A to B
to… Z. And you'd never dated/numbered the pages! How do you reestablish your
self-identity, self-awareness, with this loose sheaf of dirtied paper? You need
to read it, refer to it, use it, NOW; no time to sort and analyze… and here
comes a bull!!
I gave up after a few years of
first-person vignettes, since I couldn't find a way to bring the story – by its
very nature – to rise above being a dreckful hash of jumbled, disordered
pieces. A good several of these pieces into the book, there was to come the
fellow's key recollection/recount of how his memory was scrambled… likely
several pages after the (later) conclusion of how to unscramble it all. Slowly,
lurching through his lifetime, he'd rebuild himself using his emerging
realization of what had befallen his psyche. This would be told in the nature
of the vignettes, and the commonality that begins to emerge between them.
I followed this up with a sample
vignette, inviting either of my occasional readers to actually help themselves
to it and see what they could make of it, should they be interested. Why not? I
wasn't doing anything with it.
Well, here's another piece of
tripe, this from a later phase of my fragmentary pieces in the late eighties –
the same flood of quick bits that gave us a boy and his Cornelius. So, once again… steal my
stuff!!
I slapped the alarm cutoff and spent a
full half-second of aural ecstasy in its absence. But enough of that, too; I
had to focus my attention on getting this disintegrating scow down in less than
twenty pieces.
With the heat shield ablating
everywhere it wasn't supposed to, this poor-man's crash-landing was feeling
like a mad scientist's toboggan ride into Hell… say, starting at the lip of the
Grand Canyon. Picture that? Good; now remove the shock absorbers. And the air
conditioner. Pull out your earplugs. And supe up on ultraspeed, about 150 cc's.
What response I was getting from the
broken control sticks was more welcome than afterburners in Indianapolis;
nonetheless, I'd've given even half my control power for just a little
imaging on the screens. It's really nice to be able to see where you're going
to get buried –
I pretended the sweat wasn't making my
hands slippery, and I prayed the ship into the position
I'd almost be able to survive. Pull up, belly down,
and ignore all images of the fifties' serials –
You know, some crash-landings don't
make any sound at all.
***
How long I'd been sitting on my
tuchis, staring at the still-steaming steel-heap, I'll never know. I had slowly
come to realize, in less than an eon, that Hell looked remarkably like the last
view I'd had through a viewscreen of a flying saucer, only this was about five
miles closer.
While considering the possible
benefits of standing up, I concluded that I must have been thrown into a
Heinlein novel. Boy, that old guy sure could write 'em, couldn't he? I wondered
how soon a redhead with a big nose would come sauntering up (nude, or en
kilt?), while a smaller part of my brain was inventorying broken bones,
bumps, bruises, and chirping birds.
My literary criticism was interrupted
by the total: no bones broken, three sprains, a wrench, and three-thousand
two-hundred and ninety-four bruises. I noted this as a conservative estimate.
Next cliché: where was I? Roswell, New
Mexico? Boy, I'd have fun explaining that one. "You see, President
Eisenhower – " or was it Harry Truman?
No Roswell here. Nor New Mexico. Nor
Mexicans. What was here was a low hill with a smoking ruin crumpled against one
side. No smoldering furrow; I must've almost cleared this rise.
On the other side –
Climbing the hill, I listened to my
bones and tendons reassure me that they still had nerve-endings, and took the
reassurance as a good sign. I didn't complain over eighty decibels. Call it a
grunt.
On the other side –
On the other side was the reason I
could thank God for placing hills in unexpected places. I was looking on an
ocean – well, enormous lake with no opposite shore visible; waves; tide? An ocean.
My strained imagination pictured me
trying to get out of a ruined foo-fighter under a hundred feet of water, and
being unable to open what remained of a hatch. Or, worse, being
able to open it. "The waters come rushing in – "
Someday soon, I really must take up
swimming lessons; this doggie-paddle's for the birds. All that water, and just
this one li'l hill between me and it –
O most merciful Allah, I most humbly
praise thee for thy compassion, most lovingly bestowed on this thy undeserving
worm…
I never did see the chappie with the
bow; as I fell backward I noticed an arrow had decided to grow out of my chest.
My last thought, as I looked up at the dusk racing down on me, was a
recollection of an old story: a man had plunged his car down a two-hundred
-foot embankment, staggered back up the slope, and through the broken
guardrail, only to be struck down and killed instantly by a passing ambulance.
[fragment ends here]
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